ABSTRACT

We propose that Messari continues to provide research and reporting services for Venus Protocol in the form of Quarterly Reports. This will serve to better inform existing stakeholders and attract new ones while building out a decentralized and permissionless borrow/lend protocol money market community.

ABOUT MESSARI

Messari is a team of crypto natives passionate about building powerful data analytics tools for the web3 world. The company was started in early 2018 and has since scaled to over 100 employees after raising a Series B led by Brevan Howard. Messari has also received a grant from The Graph to become a core developer. It has allowed the company to build and standardize subgraphs, creating a robust open-source data infrastructure for the broader crypto ecosystem.

Messari is functionally split into two distinct units:

• Messari Enterprise, a paywalled market intelligence platform that operates like a traditional SaaS business.
• Messari Protocol Services, which provides research and reporting services on behalf of protocols and DAOs. The entirety of the work from the underlying data infrastructure to the reports themselves are open sourced and publicly available. Therefore, the work is sustained based on grants from projects whether through the development team, grants program, or DAO treasury funding.

This proposal is coming on behalf of Messari Protocol Services.

PROPOSAL BREAKDOWN

Quarterly Reports

• Four (4) Quarterly Reports on Venus that present and analyze KPIs and fundamental metrics including:

• Financial metrics: Total Fees Paid, Protocol Side Revenue, Supply Side Revenue, Venus Prime Revenue, Token Valuation and Token Incentive Inflation

• Network metrics: Daily Active Users, User Activity

• Venus Protocol specific metrics: Total Value Borrowed, Total Value Locked, Average. Utilization Rate, Net Borrow/Repay, Net Deposit/(Withdraw), Bad Debt Metrics, Liquidation Volume, Average Daily Users, and XVS Staked

• Examples: State of Venus Q3’24 , State of Venus Q2’24

RATIONALE

Surfacing on-chain metrics and key developments

These reports better inform existing stakeholders through recurring, data-driven research from trusted, independent analysts. The actionable insights generated from these reports will better educate them on the economic, financial, and social health of Venus, whether it’s a surge in trading volume across a certain market or the implications of a major upgrade or governance decision. There are compounding effects to this as various stakeholders are able to leverage our work to further their goals.

Examples:

• Gauntlet using Messari’s assessment of interest rate optimizations on protocol revenue to further quantify the impact.
• Compound proposal to deploy Compound III on Ronin

Facilitate protocol business development

This information gets sent out to over 350,000 of our subscribers of which ⅓ comprises most of the top crypto-native builders in the space. By continuing to deliver high-quality information around Venus’s mechanics and real traction, it increases the likelihood of more projects building on and integrating with Venus.

We’ve seen Messari’s reporting frequently end up on major DAO governance forums (deploying Uniswap on Filecoin VM and Avalanche)

Institutional adoption

Existing mainstream coverage of crypto is woefully lacking. Investment banking and sell-side equity research coverage of crypto fails to paint an accurate picture of the material developments in this industry. When it comes to DeFi and even more nuanced aspects of this industry, things only get worse.

To combat this Messari has spent significant resources getting onboarded to many of the largest traditional research platforms in the world, including the Bloomberg Terminal, S&P Capital IQ, and Refinitiv. This goes a long way to further professionalize the projects we work with to the vast majority of major funds, banks, financial service companies, and large corporations in the world. After reading these reports, these entities will better grasp the magnitude of economic activity generated by the protocol.

There are trillions of dollars in AUM represented by the consumers of these platforms, so even a small percentage of users consuming this information and acting on it can drive meaningful activity on-chain.

Distribution Metrics

Commitment to transparency

Funding this reporting underscores Venus’s proactive commitment to transparency, public awareness, and accountability, both fundamental principles in this industry. It sends positive signals to potential users, clients, and partners.

PRICING & RESOURCES

“State of Venus” Quarterly Reports cost $23,750 each, totaling a $95K TCV contract for 12-15 months of collaboration. This goes towards funding:

Research

Messari analysts spend several weeks researching and writing each report, along with an extensive internal editing and review process by the broader team.

Data Science and Engineering

Each report will have its own dedicated data science and engineering resources tasked with providing all the relevant raw data. This requires ingesting large amounts of data which is housed in a data warehouse, incurring storage and compute costs.

Distribution

Messari has several members of the team working on distribution for these reports across all of Messari’s channels along with the third-party partners.